Just a fad?

My first intuitive reaction, and I guess I wasn’t the only one (article in French, sorry), was to consider that all this buzz about Pinterest would be just another fad, after the previous episodes with companies like Quora, Empire Avenue, etc. and that the service would probably be forgotten after 3 or 6 months.

To keep it short, and not to dive too much into the details, here are some of the reasons why I still doubt that there could be clear business opportunities for business in Pinterest in the current situation:

- Please remind me which need the service is supposed to address? OK, I know that the same could have been said about twitter like four years ago

- None of it’s feature are not already offered by other existing services – and sometimes well established ones

- From “pin” to “repin”, the original links to the brands sites or commerce sites are lost, and bring no value to businesses

- No possibility to insert Google Analytics markers in Pinterest, which is not the case in tumblr

- Very simple, or simplistic text formatting, especially for the text below the pictures which is just plain text with no formatting possibilities

- The user interface is English only as of today (please remember that I work mostly for French clients)

- It seems to be the latest Silicon Valley’s pet or toy, and “we” will probably quickly move on to something else

This is it: the audience for Pinterest looks very different from the other startups, if you trust the data from Google Correlate. Google Correlate sketches a picture of an audience that spans in a region between the Southern and Midwest region of the US: Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, and add the Utah to the list.

This is interesting since I haven’t been able to find a similar pattern for any of the recently buzz-worthy startups. Most of those have audiences that are located – according to Google Correlate – in the West coast and East coast, but much lower in the states from the Southern and Midwest regions. This is very unique to Pinterest. Just have a look by yourself:

Google Correlate about Pinterest

You can check by yourself the graphics below from Google Correlate on the following search terms: Quora, Instagram, Storify, Startup and TechCrunch.

Hint: Click on the graphics to visit the Google Correlate result page and explore the results and correlations by yourself. Scroll down the page to see the graphics with the US states.

Since I hate to waste an occasion to make a (bad) joke, let me just say this: Guys, given the strong correlation between “Pinterest” and “reasons to divorce”, if your wife get very passionate about Pinterest I would suggest that you do something and take care of the situation ;)

Also, you can give a try to the following terms and check the correlations: “mortgage”, “refinance”, “debt”, “unemployment”, “homework”, “housekeeping”. Do you begin to see the pattern?

Final word

My personal conclusion, that I share with you here, it that the buzz about Pinterest wasn’t probably started by an article from TechCrunch or a post from Robert Scoble. I think that Pinterest had found it’s audience. Or rather I’d should say it the other way roud: the audience has found the service that fullfils one of it’s needs and that it has adopted, beyond all mode effects from the usual early adopters and experts from the Silicon Valley.

Hence, I’m less convinced that this service will follow the same schema as Quora, Empire Avenue or the likes and be forgotten in 3 or 6 months from now. It’s now quite clear to me that the simplicity and the clarity in the user interface have resonated to an audience for whom a simple tumblr was already overkill and too complicated.

Here is one of the best content that I’ve seen lately about Facebook, and the fact that the social network is going public. It comes from Publicis Modem London, it is published on SlideShare, and I really recommend that you spend some time browsing through it’s content.

If I summarize: More than 85% of it’s revenue comes from advertising. Facebook is soon going public with a valuation of roughly $100bn. At first sight, you can think that this number is absolutely huge, and that it could hardly make multiples, which is basically the reason why investors would invest.

But then you realize that facebook in 2010 grabbed only a small 3% of the total digital market, when Google earned a comfortable 46%. The ARPU of a Google user is 8 times more than the ARPU for a Facebook user, so there’s room for a progression.

How can facebook increase it’s revenue? Either by adding more users, or by selling more ads, or by selling more performant and more expensive ads.

So, the other option is to push more ads to the users – we have seen lately a new picture viewer which now can display ads in the right column – and also to make better and more expensive ads, by better target profiling. This is where the new “Open Graph v2″ APIs comes to play, and will allow a never seen before highly accurate and fine user profiling by logging each and every of your so-called “frictionless activities”. What you read, what you listen to, the videos you’re watching, and so on and so forth, all your actions “online” – and not only while in Facebook, and now only in your browser, just think of your Spotify player on your iPhone… – will sculpt a very realistic portrait of you as a consumer.

This is a brilliant strategy to build a much better and finer ads system than the current Google AdWords leader. No doubt that the gap between the 3% and 46% of the digital pie between facebook and google from 2010 will soon become a figure of the past.

To be continued… :)

Oh, and make sure you don’t miss their 9 points in the “What If” section, starting at slide #52.

Ever though of the potential of these 9 ideas that facebook could eventually implement someday? Can you feel that power?